Study Reveals Parents’ Perceptions of Educational Screen Time

By
Melissa Maypole on
01-27-2014

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A new study published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center offers some valuable insight into parents’ perceptions of their children’s media use. The report, entitled Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America, sought to uncover how much of the media today’s children are consuming has value as an educational tool. Researchers surveyed over 1500 parents of kids ages 2-10 to find out how often kids are engaging with educational media and how much they are learning from these experiences.

Below are some of the study’s key findings:

Parents reported that almost half (44%) of the screen time allotted to their children daily is spent with educational media.

Over half of the parents surveyed (57%) report that their children have learned a lot from educational media.

The majority of educational media (67%) consumed by children daily comes from television programming.

As the study acknowledges, parents’ perceptions about what kinds of media can be considered educational may or may not be accurate. For instance, a whopping 42% of moms and dads labeled the popular video game Minecraft “not at all educational” though it has been touted by many an expert as one of the most creative games kids can play. Even so, the majority of parents surveyed (65%) successfully recognized the cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants as the mind-numbing waste of time it is.